Gs (out of a possible five)Before we start, I should warn you, if you've seen this movie's trailer you've probably been deceived. I know I was. Going in, I expected some kind of dark comedy about urban life, with some senseless destruction thrown in for giggles.
Boy howdy, was I wrong.
In his career, we've seen Michael Douglas play a whole pack of weird characters. But with this one, we've hit the jackpot.
The back of Falling Down's box calls this character Bill Foster, though the audience doesn't know this for half the movie (instead we know him by his car's license plate: D-fens). Bill has reached that point in his life Eminem talks about so much. That point where you just don't give a fuck anymore.
But that's not completely true, Bill does give a fuck about one thing and one thing only: getting home to his little girl's birthday party. We first meet him on the LA freeway, caught in rush hour traffic. The movie opens with a great 3-minuet segment without any real dialog in which we get to watch Bill go insane. Leaving his car in gridlock traffic Bill announces that he's "going home" and walks off into the distance.
Thus begins Bill's trek through Los Angeles. On his way "home" (which, in this case, means his ex-wife's house) he meets, greets and beats every stereotypical low life piece of sh*t in LA. Korean grocers, Latino gangsters, fast food restaurants, neo-Nazis. And after stealing a gym bag full of guns from the gang bangers, things just get better.
Attempting to chase him down through all this is Sgt. Prendergast (Robert Duvall), a lone desk jockey cop on his last day of work. And, unlike Danny Glover, Prendergast really is getting to old for this sh*t. But this last case sucks him in and causes him to butt heads with the standard police captain. At least Captain Yardley (Raymond J. Barry) isn't an overweight black man who yells all the time.
Falling Down is hard to classify. In one moment, the movie can viscous to the point of masochism before turning around and showing something that almost melts you. Though I think at its core the movie is a tragedy. Bill is a very sad character when you think about it because he's not a supervillain, or a psycho in a mask, or some kind of rubber alien, he's just a man. Hell, look at the way he dresses: white shirt, tie, pocket protector, glasses. D-fens is the everyday workings stiff, driven completely off his rocker by the world in which he lives. So he clings to the only thing that gives him any source of peace anymore: his daughter. And it's her birthday, so he's trying to get home. And, as he says, "If everyone will just stay out of my way no one will get hurt."
Douglas makes a great insane person, no doubt about it. Bill isn't an easy character to play. Unlike you're typical movie psycho, Bill can be calm and cool one moment, then suffer a violent mood swing and blow the crap out of a phone booth with a submachine gun. Despite his Drew Carey-ish appearance, Bill is probably the only person in the movie who isn't a stereotype.
Duvall's character is the same way. He's a fairly well rounded individual. Being a cop who's "to old for this sh*t" is not the only thing there is to his character. Both he and Bill are human enough to be comfortable and scary. And they've both won Academy Awards so they'd better be able to project, or somebody gonna get some.
Filling out the cast is a nice conglomerate of supporting characters like Prendgast's old partner, Sandra (Rachel Ticotin), or a kid Bill meets on the freeway who somehow knows how to operate a rocket launcher. That sequence alone is priceless.
In fact the whole script is priceless, and I hope writer Ebbe Roe Smith got more then he asked for. It's hard to write a character like Bill and make the audience care for him. And you do care, because, like I said, Bill just wants to go home.
I probably should mention that this movie was directed by Joel (Batman and Robin) Schumacher, but, really, why should I? He killed Batman, after all, why inflate his head? I will say, however, that Joel's Mike Bay style of direction works here, if only because Bill is supposed to be insane.
Be warned, though. Falling Down paints a very stark, very straightforward picture of modern urban life. I've never visited Gangland Los Angeles but the LA presented in this movie feels . . . real. Especially in this day and age.
MOCK O METER
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